How to transcribe a call on a Mac: Zoom, Teams, Meet and FaceTime, and where the audio goes

Which method transcribes which call?

The quickest way to choose is to start from the call app you use and the plan you are on. This table says what each built-in option needs and where it keeps the result.

Plans and admin settings change: if an option is missing in your call app, the vendor's help page for your account type is the one that decides.

How do you record and transcribe a FaceTime call on a Mac?

FaceTime can record an audio call with one other person and write its transcript into Notes. It does not record video calls or group calls.

1. During a FaceTime audio call, click the button to show more options, then click Call Recording. Both of you hear that the call is being recorded.
2. To stop, click the same button, then Stop.
3. Open Notes and go to the Call Recordings folder to play the recording and read the transcript.

With Apple Intelligence, Notes can also summarise a recorded call, in the languages and regions where it is available.

Can Live Captions transcribe a call on a Mac?

Live Captions shows a real-time transcript of what your Mac plays, processed on the device, but it is a reading aid, not a transcript you keep.

• Turn it on in System Settings › Accessibility › Live Captions. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon, and the first use downloads language data.
• It captions one source at a time: the sound coming out of the Mac (the other people on the call) or the microphone (you, or a conversation in the room). The microphone button in its window switches between the two.
• The text is not saved. For notes after the call, you need one of the other methods.

What about the transcripts built into Zoom, Teams and Meet?

The transcripts built into Zoom, Teams and Meet work well when your account has them, and they all run in the vendor's cloud: the audio is processed there and the transcript is stored with the meeting.

• Zoom creates an audio transcript only from a cloud recording, on a Pro, Business, Education or Enterprise account where an admin has turned on audio transcription. A recording saved to your computer gets no transcript.
• Google Meet transcripts are part of eligible paid Google Workspace editions and are saved to the organiser's Drive.
• Teams live transcription runs in the desktop app; the organiser and people from the same organisation can start it, and the transcript is kept in the organiser's OneDrive.

If you are a guest, on a free plan, or the meeting belongs to another organisation, these options are often not yours to start. That is the case an app on your own Mac covers.

How do you transcribe any call on your Mac, without a bot?

An app on your Mac can listen to two things at once: your microphone, and the sound the call plays on the Mac. No bot joins the meeting and no one has to change a setting on their side.

Tack+ does it in its Meetings page (version 1.0.71, 15 October 2026):

1. When Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp or a browser (for Meet) starts using the microphone, the notch of your MacBook offers to transcribe. Click it, or click the red button in Meetings.
2. The first time, macOS asks to let Tack+ record the computer's audio: it appears in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen & System Audio Recording.
3. Each sentence appears about a second after the person stops talking, labelled You (your microphone) or Them (the call). You can pause, or mark a moment to find it later.
4. At the end, the call is kept as text. Copy it, export it as Markdown to Documents, or find it again from the panel's search.

What it does not do: it does not recognise individual voices (everyone on the call is “Them”), it does not record video, and it starts only when you ask — unless you turn on “Transcribe without waiting for a click” in its settings. Tell the people on the call: in many countries, transcribing a conversation requires their consent.

Where do the audio and the transcript go?

Where the audio and the text go is the question to ask of any transcription method, because “local” is used loosely: a tool can skip the bot and still upload the audio, or transcribe on the Mac and send the text to a cloud model.

• Transcription: in Tack+, each sentence is written to a temporary file, transcribed by macOS speech recognition on the Mac, then the file is deleted. The audio is never kept and never sent.
• Storage: the text is a file in Tack+'s folder on your Mac. It is not synced and not sent to Tack+'s servers.
• Summary: if you installed the local assistant, its model reads the transcript on the Mac and writes a few lines, a title and the action items. A short call took about 15 seconds on a MacBook Air M4 in our test.

Why does the other person's voice appear twice in a transcript?

Without headphones, your microphone also hears the speakers, so the other person's sentence arrives twice: once from the call, once from your microphone, a fraction of a second later.

Headphones solve it at the source. Tack+ also compares the two and drops the microphone copy when it repeats the call's sentence, keeping the cleaner one. A short reply such as “OK” is never treated as an echo.

What can you do with the transcript afterwards?

A transcript is useful when it turns into decisions and tasks, not when it sits in a folder.

• Summary and actions: the local assistant writes 2 to 5 lines, a title, and the things someone agreed to do.
• Tasks: one click sends the action items to the To-do widget.
• Export: Markdown with the summary, checkboxes for the actions, the marked moments and the timestamped transcript.
• Notes by voice: for a quick note after the call, dictation writes where your cursor is.